System, and method for interactive browsing

ABSTRACT

The present invention provides a system and method for achieving interactive browsing. Said system is coupled to a knowledge base and a document database, said knowledge base stores a plurality of terms and information relating to each term, and said document database stores a plurality of documents. Said system comprises term acquiring means, for acquiring terms in which a user has much interest; first extracting means, for extracting information relating to the terms in which the user has much interest, from the knowledge base; second extracting means, for extracting documents containing the terms in which the user has much interest, from the document database; a first display part in a user interface, for displaying information extracted by the first extracting means; and a second display part in the user interface, for displaying a list of the documents extracted by the second extracting means. With the present invention, one can browse both documents and information on terms in the documents in a single interface.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention generally relates to information technology, andmore particularly, to a system and method for interactively browsinginformation.

DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART

As more and more electronic documents are stored in computer, it becomesimportant how to manage the documents and get information effectively.

At present, there are primarily three ways to acquire information. Thefirst one is taxonomy. Taxonomy typically organizes a large scale ofdocuments into a hierarchical structure according to the content of thedocuments. The user can click the directory and find useful information.However, the user usually not only wants to browse documents, but alsowants to get information of the terms in the documents, for example, theinformation about a person, a company, or a product mentioned in thedocuments in which he has much interest. In this circumstance, thetraditional taxonomy based information browsing system cannot providethis kind of information directly.

The second way for user to acquire information is knowledge base. Theknowledge base is a static information collection, through which theuser can obtain explanation and illustration of specific terms. Sincethe content in the knowledge base is relatively stable and not updatedin real time, it is difficult to associate with timely updated contentsin the large scale of documents.

The third way for user to acquire information is keyword search, throughwhich the user can obtain all the documents containing a certainkeyword. Since the search is generally made without context, thisapproach is somewhat ambiguous. As a result, the results of the searchinclude many unassociated documents, which prevents the user fromacquiring desired information.

As can be seen, each of the above three ways can only respectively meeta certain aspect of user requirement to acquire information (either onlybrowse the whole document, or only view a specific term), but can notmeet various requirements concurrently. Therefore, it is desirable forthe user to easily view specific terms in relevant documents in a singleuser interface while browsing the documents.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

In view of the above problems, the invention provides a method andsystem for interactively browsing document set and the terms therein,which enables the user to acquire relevant information from the documentset and knowledge base concurrently in one user interface.

According to one aspect of the invention, a system for achievinginteractive browsing is provided, said system is coupled to a knowledgebase and a document database, said knowledge base stores a plurality ofterms and information relating to each term, and said document databasestores a plurality of documents, said system comprising:

-   -   term acquiring means, for acquiring terms in which a user has        much interest;    -   first extracting means, for extracting information relating to        the terms in which the user has much interest, from the        knowledge base;    -   second extracting means, for extracting documents containing the        terms in which the user has much interest, from the document        database;    -   a first display part in a user interface, for displaying        information extracted by the first extracting means; and    -   a second display part in the user interface, for displaying a        list of the documents extracted by the second extracting means.

According to another aspect of the invention, a method for achievinginteractive browsing is also provided, said method comprising:

-   -   acquiring terms in which a user has much interest;    -   extracting information relating to the terms in which the user        has much interest, from a knowledge base, in order to display        the information in a first display part of a user interface,        said knowledge base stores a plurality of terms and information        relating to each term; and    -   extracting documents containing the terms in which the user has        much interest, from a document database, in order to display a        list of the extracted documents in a second display part of the        user interface, said document database storing a plurality of        documents.

Through the above system and method according to the invention, the usermay browse the documents and knowledge base concurrently in a singleinterface.

The information relating to the terms preferably is their propertiesand/or relations among them.

In addition, said terms and their relevant information are preferablydisplayed in the first display part of the user interface in the form ofa term graph, such that the terms and their properties and relations canbe visually presented to the user.

The system and method according to the invention enable the user tobrowse the documents and their relevant terms concurrently, therebyenhancing the freedom and flexibility for the user to accessinformation.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram showing a user interface when anembodiment according to the invention is employed.

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram showing a system in which the inventioncan be applied.

FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram showing a structure of an integratedinformation access system according to the invention.

FIG. 4 is a flowchart diagram showing a method according to theinvention.

FIG. 5 shows a flowchart diagram when a term acquiring means acquiresterms from a first display part, and presents relevant term graphs anddocuments.

FIG. 6 is a schematic diagram showing a user interface for generating adocument list from the term graph.

FIG. 7 shows a flowchart diagram when a term acquiring means acquiresterms from a second display part, and presents corresponding termgraphs.

FIG. 8 is a schematic diagram showing a user interface for generating aterm graph from the document list.

FIG. 9 is a schematic diagram showing a user interface for generating aterm graph from one document.

FIG. 10 shows functional relations between stages of the method andsystem according to the invention.

FIGS. 11-13 are flowchart diagrams showing Function 1, Function 2, andFunction 3 interacted between documents, terms and sub-graphs,respectively.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS

Before describing the embodiments of the invention in greater detail, wewill first discuss the meaning of the technical words used in theinvention.

term: a special word describing things in the nature or in a virtualworld, including name of a person, name of a place, name of anorganization, specialized words such as IBM, DELL, and etc.;knowledge base (KB): a database describing terms, their properties andrelations among them;document database (Doc DB): a database containing keywords, content ofdocuments, and other metadata of documents;term graph: a graphical representation of all the terms in the knowledgebase and their properties and relations;term sub-graph: a graphical representation of properties and relationsof a part of terms in the knowledge base (since in the presentspecification, only “term sub-graph” is concerned in most circumstances,for discussion convenience, the “term sub-graph” is shortly referred toas “term graph); andontology: defining types of terms and properties and relations ofvarious types of terms; for example, the type of COMPANY has propertieslike NAME, WEB_SITE, ADDRESS, CEO, PRODUCTS, and relations likeCOMPETITOR, PARTNER; the ontology is stored in the knowledge base.

Preferred embodiments of the invention will be discussed below withreference to the attached drawings. It shall be noted that, although thepresent specification will be described mainly by taking example for thedocuments in the Internet, the invention is not limited to this. Theinvention may be equally applied where information browsing andsearching is needed, for example, in a database.

Illustrative User Interface

Firstly refer to FIG. 1, which shows a schematic diagram of a userinterface when a system and method of the invention are employed. FIG. 1illustratively divides the user interface 100 into several windowsincluding a term graph window 110, and a document list window 130,wherein a document content window 120, a term instance list window 140and a query window 150 are preferable components of the invention.

When a user is interested in a specific term (for example, IDC company),preferably, he may submit the term “IDC company” to the system using thequery window 150. The system may first retrieve information regarding“IDC company” from the knowledge base, and then display properties andrelations of the term “IDC company” retrieved from the knowledge base inthe term graph window 110, with the “IDC company” as a primary node.

For display convenience, FIG. 1 only shows a term graph extending fromthe primary node to a node in the next level (i.e. one edge). However,the present invention is not limited to this. The invention may displaya term graph having nodes of arbitrary levels, depending on factors suchas computing power of the system, size of a display interface and user'srequirements.

In addition, according to a preferred embodiment of the invention, FIG.1 shows displaying relations and properties of the terms by using a termgraph of a tree structure, which can visually reflect various aspects ofinformation of a term. A text description can also be used in place ofthe term graph. For example, the following text may be given in the termgraph window 110: “IDC company is a customer of HP company; The websiteof IDC company is http://www.idc.com; IDC China company is a branch ofIDC company; The contact of IDC company is Mike Williams; . . . ”.

When the term “IDC company” is submitted to the system, it is also usedto search the document database to acquire relevant documents. Thesearched relevant documents are listed in the document list window 130subsequently. At this time, the user may click on a document to browsespecific content of the document in the document content window 120.

Therefore, relevant information of the term and documents containing theterm may be concurrently displayed in a single user interface for theuser, thereby providing convenience for user to browse.

The user interface shown in FIG. 1 preferably includes a term instancelist window 140 that displays a series of terms. The above terms may beinput in advance (for example, a list of companies can be prepared andthe companies' specific information can be displayed), or may bedynamically extracted from the current document list through textanalysis. Further, the term instance list window 140 can also includesome filtering criteria formed from AND/OR logical relation of theterms, for example, the occurrence of all the terms or the occurrence ofany of the terms. Therefore, said term instance list window 140 composesa term filter from which the user can select a combination of differentterms, use an appropriate filtering criteria to form a new query andsubmit the query to the system, such that a new document list can beextracted from the document database. In the embodiment as shown in FIG.1, the newly extracted documents will be those documents that containany one of three options highlighted in the term instance list window140. Therefore, the flexibility for the user to browse documents andobtain information will be further improved.

As can be seen, the solution of the invention allows the user toretrieve information he has much interest in anywhere from the userinterface, and to perform the retrieve cyclically until acquiring allthe information he wants, which greatly improves the freedom andflexibility for the user to acquire information.

Structural Configuration and Operation Mode

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram showing an overall system 200 in which theinvention can be employed. The left side of the dotted line in thesystem 200 shows conventional portions forming the document database andthe knowledge base, and the right side shows a portion that employs anintegrated information access system according to the invention.

The traditional portions forming the document database and the knowledgebase comprise a text analysis portion 210, which performs text analysison the documents in document set 220, which includes analyzing inputtext information to extract keywords 212 and terms 214 therefrom.

For example, the keywords 212 in the document may be extracted by anatural language tokenizer (not shown). A named entity recognizer canalso extract named entities automatically (i.e. those special wordsserving as terms). The information such as keywords and named entitiesare submitted to the document database 230 and stored in it, forconvenience of document query.

The terms 214, their relations and properties recognized by said textanalysis operation are submitted to the knowledge base 240 to composeterm instances and information such as properties and relations of theterms. The information about the terms is stored in the knowledge base.Ontology can be used to describe the type of the terms in the knowledgebase and their properties and relations. For example, the type of theterms can be PERSON, COMPANY, PLACE, etc. The properties for a COMPANYcan be NAME, WEB_SITE, ADDRESS, CEO, PRODUCTS, etc. The information inthe knowledge base can be input by human manually, or extracted by aninformation extractor from the documents automatically. Both theontology information and the term instance information are stored in theknowledge base.

For a traditional system, the document database 230 and the knowledgebase 240 operate independently from each other, one providing documentcontent for the user and the other providing term information for theuser. They produce their own user interfaces, respectively.

However, according to the invention, it is possible to associate thedocument database 230 with the knowledge base 240 by adding anintegrated information access system 260, thus making it possible togenerate a user interface as shown in FIG. 1.

The structure of the integrated information access system 260 will bedescribed in greater detail below with reference to FIG. 3. FIG. 3 is aschematic diagram showing the overall structure of the integratedinformation access system 260 according to the invention, in whichcomponents represented by solid-line-blocks are basic components of theinvention, and components represented by dotted-line-blocks are optionalcomponents of the invention.

As shown in FIG. 3, the integrated information access system 260comprises first extracting means 310 connected to the knowledge base,from which information regarding the terms the user has much interest incan be extracted (the information may comprise properties or relationsof the terms); second extracting means 320 connected to the documentdatabase, from which documents containing the terms in which the userhas much interest can be extracted; a first display part 330 fordisplaying the information extracted by the first extracting means 310;a second display part 340 for displaying a list of the documentsextracted by the second extracting means 320; and a term acquiring means350 for acquiring terms in which the user has much interest.

In a preferred embodiment of the invention, said term acquiring means350 can acquire terms either from the information displayed in the firstdisplay part 330 or from the list of documents displayed in the seconddisplay part 340.

According to another preferred embodiment of the invention, saidintegrated information access system 260 also comprises a third displaypart 360 in the user interface, for displaying specific content of acertain document in the list of the second display part 340. Said termacquiring means 350 can also acquire the terms in which the user hasmuch interest from the third display part. For example, when the userclicks on a certain document in the documents extracted from thedocument database, its content will be displayed through the thirddisplay part 360, and said term acquiring means 350 can acquire thespecific terms in which the user has much interest from the thirddisplay part 360, in order to complete the operations as describedbefore in the invention. Further, when the user is interested in aspecific term occurred in the certain document, he might further viewthe information on the term graph of the term.

According to another preferred embodiment of the invention, saidintegrated information access system 260 further comprises a fourthdisplay part 370 serving as the term instance list window 140. Saidfourth display part can include some filtering criteria formed by AND/ORlogical relations of the terms, for example, the occurrence of all theterms or the occurrence of any term. Each filtering criteria comprises aplurality of options. Said term instance list may be input to the systemin advance (for example, a list of companies can be prepared and thecompanies' specific information can be displayed), or can be obtained byperforming the text analysis as described before on the document list.Therefore, the user may select a combination of different options fromthe window, form a new query and submit it to the system, such that anew document list can be extracted from the document database.

According to another embodiment of the invention, said integratedinformation access system 260 also comprises a fifth display part 380used as the query window 150.

Said term acquiring means 350 can also acquire specific terms in whichthe user has much interest from the fifth display part (for example,through an input operation of the user), in order to carry out theoperations as described before in the invention.

The term acquiring means 350 preferably further comprises a queryforming means (not shown) for extracting corresponding terms in the newterm graph and their properties and relations, from the knowledge base,forming a new query and submitting the query to the document database.

The term acquiring means 350 preferably further comprises a textanalysis means (not shown) for performing text analysis on the documentlist in order to extract the terms in which the user has much interestand their properties or relations. Said text analysis means can performsaid text analysis operation online (for example by sorting the termsand determining their weights), or, if the document database itself hasperformed text-recognition on the terms, said text analysis means canalso acquiring the terms from the document database directly. Further,when said text analysis means deciding which terms are to be extracted,it can extract the terms according to user's demand based on categoriesof the terms (for example, company, place, task, and so on) or priority(for example, frequency of occurrence of a term or weight of the term).

As will be appreciated by those skilled in the art, various means usedin the invention may be implemented by programming, discrete hardwarecomponents or the combination of the two.

A flowchart of a method according to the invention is shown in FIG. 4.The method starts at step 400, and then proceeds to step 410. In step410, the system acquires a term in which the user has much interest (forexample, “IDC company”). Next, in step 420, the system extractsinformation relating to the term in which the user has much interestfrom the knowledge base. At the same time, in step 430, the systemextracts documents containing the terms in which the user has muchinterest from the document database. Then in step 440, the informationextracted in steps 420 and 430 is respectively displayed in the firstand second display part of the user interface. Thereafter, theoperations in steps 410-440 may be repeated as needed, such that thesystem can continuously acquire the terms in which the user has muchinterest from the first and second display parts, in order to enable theuser to freely browse the desired documents and term information. Themethod according to the invention ends at step 450.

Different ways for acquiring terms from different parts of the userinterface by the term acquiring means according to the invention will bedescribed below with reference to FIGS. 5-7.

FIG. 5 depicts a situation where said term acquiring means 350 furtheracquires a term from the first display part 330 and presents itsrelevant term graph and document. That is, the user desires to acquire anew term graph relating to another term (for example, HP company) in theterm graph of the current term (here, “IDC company”) and views a list ofdocuments relating to the new term graph.

The method of FIG. 5 starts at step 500, and then proceeds to step 510.In step 510, still taking example for the term graph as shown in FIG. 1,it is assumed that the system has acquired another term (for example,“HP company”) from the user in which he has much interest. Then, in step520, the first extracting means 310 extracts a new term graph relatingto the term from the knowledge base to display it in the first displaypart of the system. Then, the method according to the invention proceedsto step 530 where corresponding terms in the new term graph and theirproperties and relations are extracted from the knowledge base to form anew query and the query is submitted to the document database. Next, instep 540, the document database is searched in response to the query tofind documents matching with the query. Then, in step 550, the foundmatched documents are presented to the user. The method according to theinvention ends at step 560, and a corresponding user interface is shownin FIG. 6.

In the operation of step 530 in FIG. 5, on one hand, one can onlyextract properties and relations relating to a primary node (here, “HPcompany”) of the new term graph from the knowledge base, and form a newquery by using the primary node and its property and relation to searchfor further documents; on the other hand, one can extract properties andrelations relating to a plurality of nodes in the new term graph fromthe knowledge base, and form a new query by using the plurality of nodesand their properties and relations to search for further documents. Inan actual operation, which one of the above two ways is adopted may bespecified by the user or preset by the system.

FIG. 7 describes a situation where said term acquiring means 350acquires a term from the document list window in the second display part340 and presents corresponding documents. That is, the user desires toview the specific terms occurred in the document list or relations amongthem.

The method of FIG. 7 starts at step 700, and then proceeds to step 710.In step 710, it is assumed that, the user is interested in certain termsexisted in the document list and their properties or relations. Then, instep 720, the term acquiring means 350 extracts the term in which theuser has much interest and its property or relation by performing textanalysis on the document list through its text analysis means.

After that, the method according to the invention proceeds to step 730where the term acquired in step 720 is submitted to the first extractingmeans for extracting a term graph relating to the term from theknowledge base. Then in step 740 the term graph is displayed. The methodof the invention ends at step 750 and a corresponding user interface isshown in FIG. 8.

As shown in the user interface of FIG. 1, words serving as the termswill be highlighted in the content of the document, which is a result ofextracting or recognizing terms when the system performs the textanalysis initially. Those words that are not extracted as terms when thetext analysis is initially performed will not be highlighted. However,regardless of a word being highlighted or not, if the user is interestedin its further information, it may be submitted to the system by forexample, clicking the word or through a similar input mechanism (whichis known in the related art and will not be discussed in detail).Therefore, relevant term information and/or documents may be acquiredaccording to the flowchart of the method of FIG. 4. A corresponding userinterface is shown in FIG. 9.

In addition, if the user desires to view all the terms occurred in thecontent of the document and the term graph of their relations andproperties, he can refer to the flowchart of the method of FIG. 7. Inthis circumstance, text analysis is also needed, for example bydetermining weights of the terms and sorting, etc. Then a new query isformed by the terms to be submitted to the knowledge base in order toextract a term graph relating to the terms and display it in the firstdisplay part.

Illustrative Functions and Algorithms

In the system and method according to the invention as descried before,the interaction between the documents, terms and sub-graphs may berepresented by using functional relations as shown in FIG. 10.Illustrative algorithms of Functions 1-3 are given below, which arerepresented by flowcharts of FIGS. 11-13 respectively. The functionsgiven here aim at illustrating the principle of the invention, and shallnot be construed as any limitation to the invention. It is assumed that,in these functions, the term graph formed by all the terms in theknowledge base K is G that contains a term set T and the document set isD.

FIG. 11 shows a method for generating terms from the document list(Function 1).

Here, suppose m documents {d₁, . . . , d_(m)}, in which there are Tterms. The method of FIG. 11 starts at step 1100 and proceeds to step1110. In step 1110, the weight of each term is initialized to 0, i.e.wt=0.0 (where t=1, . . . , T).

Then in step 1120, the weight of each term is calculated for eachdocument dj(where j=1, . . . , m) as follows:

w _(j,t) =tf _(j,t) *idf(t)

Where w_(j,t) is a weight of the t-th term (t=1, . . . T) in the j-thdocument dj of the document set, tf_(j,t) represents the frequency ofthe t-th term occurred in the j-th

-   -   N        document dj; idf (t)=log        where N represents the number of the ^(N)t documents in the        document set, N_(t) represents the number of the documents        containing the term t in the document set, idf(t) is called an        inverse document frequency which decreases with the increase of        N_(t). By iterating the above equation, the weighs of all the        terms in the document d_(j) can be calculated.

Then, in step 1130, the weights of each term in the m documents arearithmetically averaged, such that the average weight of the term iscalculated as follows:

$w_{t} = {\sum\limits_{w_{j,t}m_{j = 1}}^{1}m}$

Then, in step 1140, the terms are sorted in descend order according totheir average weights. Top k terms are selected to compose a query. Themethod as shown in FIG. 11 then ends at step 1150.

FIG. 12 shows a method for generating a sub-graph from the terms(Function 2).

The method of FIG. 12 starts at step 1200 and proceeds to step 1210. Instep 1210, suppose m terms {t₁, . . . , t_(m)}.

In step 1220, it is determined whether a connected undirected sub-graph{G₁, . . . , G_(n)} containing the m terms exists in the term graph G inthe knowledge base K. If YES, the method proceeds to step 1230 where thenumber (I₁, . . . , I_(n)) of the nodes in each connected undirectedsub-graph is calculated. In step 1240, the connected undirectedsub-graph G_(k) containing minimum number of nodes is selected to bepresented to the first display part. The method of FIG. 12 ends at step1250.

If the result of step 1220 is NO, that is, there does not exist aconnected undirected sub-graph {G₁, . . . , G_(n)} containing the mterms in the term graph G in the knowledge base K, then the methodproceeds to step 1260. For each term t_(i)ε {t₁, . . . , t_(m)}, a termgraph G_(i) is respectively generated, wherein G_(i) contains a termt_(i) and all the nodes and edges connected to the t_(i) (i.e. terms andrelations). Then, in step 1270, the m sub-graphs {G₁, . . . , G_(m)} aremerged into a graph to be presented in the first display part. Themethod then proceeds to step 1250 to end the method.

FIG. 13 shows a method for generating the document list from sub-graphs(Function 3).

The method of FIG. 13 starts at step 1300 and proceeds to step 1310. Instep 1310, given a sub-graph G_(i), suppose that the user has selected m(m≧1) terms. Then in step 1320, for each term t_(i), its property andits relevant terms (i.e. the terms connected to the term node and theirrelations) are acquired from the knowledge base K, from which a query iscomposed to be submitted to the document database for query. Then instep 1330, relevant documents are retrieved in the document database,and the returned document list is presented to the second display part.The method as shown in FIG. 13 ends at step 1340.

A process for acquiring a new term from the term graph in the firstdisplay part to query the term graph of the new term and its relevantdocuments, as described with reference to FIG. 5 above, can be achievedillustratively by the combination of Function 2 and Function 3.

A process for extracting a term from the document list to view the termgraph of the term, as described with reference to FIG. 6 above, can beachieved illustratively by the combination of Function 1 and Function 2.

A process for viewing a term in the content of the document as describedabove can be achieved illustratively by Function 2.

It can be seen from the above that, the system and method according tothe invention provides great flexibility for user to browse information.The user can acquire desired information anywhere from the userinterface.

It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that, embodiments ofthe present invention may be provided as methods, systems, or computerprogram products. Accordingly, the present invention may take the formof an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment, oran embodiment combining software and hardware aspects. A typicalcombination of hardware and software can be a universal computer systemwith a computer program. When the program is loaded and executed, thecomputer system is controlled to perform the above methods.

Furthermore, the present invention may be embodied in a computer programproduct which is embodied on one or more computer-usable storage media(including, but not limited to, disk storage, CD-ROM, optical storage,and so forth) having computer-usable program code embodied therein.

The present invention has been described with reference to flowchartillustrations and/or block diagrams of methods, apparatus (systems), andcomputer program products according to embodiments of the invention. Itwill be understood that each block of the flowchart illustrations and/orblock diagrams, and combinations of blocks in the flowchartillustrations and/or block diagrams, can be implemented by computerprogram instructions. These computer program instructions may beprovided to a processor of a general purpose computer, special purposecomputer, embedded processor, or other programmable data processingapparatus to produce a machine, such that the instructions (whichexecute via the processor of the computer or other programmable dataprocessing apparatus) create means for implementing the functionsspecified in the flowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.

These computer program instructions may also be stored in one or morecomputer-readable memories, where each such memory can direct a computeror other programmable data processing apparatus to function in aparticular manner, such that the instructions stored in thecomputer-readable memory produce an article of manufacture includinginstruction means which implement the function specified in theflowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.

The computer program instructions may also be loaded into one or morecomputers or other programmable data processing apparatus to cause aseries of operational steps to be performed on the computers or otherprogrammable apparatus to produce, on each such device, a computerimplemented process such that the instructions which execute on thedevice provide steps for implementing the functions specified in theflowchart and/or block diagram block or blocks.

The above preferred embodiments in connection with the present inventionexplain the principles of the present invention. The above explanationis merely exemplary and cannot be understood as any limitation to thepresent invention. Based on the above explanation, those skilled in theart can make any modification or variation to the present invention.However, these modifications and variations are within the scope andspirits as defined in the enclosed claims.

1-22. (canceled)
 23. A method for interactive browsing, comprising acomputer performing the steps of: acquiring terms in which a user hasinterest; extracting information relating to the terms in which the userhas interest from a knowledge base in order to display the informationin a first display part of a user interface, said knowledge base storesa plurality of terms and information relating to each term; extractingdocuments containing the terms in which the user has interest from adocument database in order to display a list of the extracted documentsin a second display part of the user interface, said document databasestoring a plurality of documents; wherein said information relating toeach term comprises a property and a relation of the term; wherein, whenthe user views content of a specific document in the document list,content of the document is displayed in a third display part of the userinterface; displaying some term instances and filtering criteria in afourth display part of the user interface; using said term instances andfilter criteria to compose a new query, in order to search a newdocument list; wherein said predefined criteria may be an AND/ORrelation of said term instances, and said at least one term instance isinput to the system in advance or is dynamically extracted from aprevious document list; wherein said step for acquiring terms acquiresthe terms in which the user has interest from the first display part;wherein said step for acquiring the terms in which the user has interestfrom the first display part further comprises: displaying a term graphof the acquired terms in the first display part; composing a new queryby extracting said terms and their relevant information from theknowledge base, and submitting the query to the document database;extracting a list of relevant documents by second extracting means; anddisplaying the list of the extracted documents in the second displaypart; wherein said step for acquiring terms further acquires the termsin which the user has interest from one of the second display part, thethird display part and the fourth display part; and wherein said stepfor acquiring the terms, when acquiring the terms in which the user hasinterest from the second, third or fourth display part, furthercomprises: extracting the terms contained in the document list ordocument content to compose a new query; submitting the query to firstextracting means to extract a term graph relating to the terms; anddisplaying the extracted term graph in the first display part; whereinsaid step for acquiring terms further acquires the terms in which theuser has much interest from a fifth display part which is used for theuser to directly input specific terms in which he has much interest; andwherein said step for acquiring the terms, when acquiring the terms inwhich the user has interest from the fifth display part, furthercomprises: extracting the terms contained in the fifth display part tocompose a new query; submitting the query to the first extracting meansto extract a term graph relating to the terms; and displaying theextracted term graph in the first display part.